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Notes -
So the Russian army never actually managed to fight somewhat competently any time in history? Really?
It has been true in almost all cases that the Russian army blunders and stumbles during the initial phase of the war but then shows itself to be capable of gradually learning and adapting even if the final outcome is defeat, as in WW1 for example. See the Brusilov offensive of 1916 in that case, characterized by John Keegan as “the greatest victory seen on any front [of WW1] since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before” (as quoted in Wikipedia). And there are cases when the important lessons are only learned after the war, such as the war against the Japanese in 1904-5 (which, by the way, wasn’t a cakewalk for the Japanese army by any means). I assume this is the consequence of the intellectual sloth and naïve romanticism that generally characterize the Russian people, the legacy of languishing as slaves for centuries etc., probably the Mongol yoke also has something to do with it, but this is largely beside the point. There are also a few cases when that initial period of incompetence is rather short, like during the naval war against the Ottomans in 1788-91, whom were soundly beaten.
In the case of WW2, the Red Army clearly demonstrated an ability to gradually gain competence, although the results generally appeared only in the final phase of the war. The offensives in the territory of present-day Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Poland in the summer of 1944 or the invasion of Manchuria in 1945 were impressive by anyone’s standards. The Russians are slow to learn maybe, but they do learn. Even the Afghanistan war wasn’t just a series of one blunder after another, just look at the battle for ‘Hill’ 3234 for example.
Westerners apparently have this usual tendency to concentrate on Russian blunders while ignoring every other factor and then assume that winning against them will always be easy. (Hence the recent proliferation of militarist neocon feminist girlboss politicians all around the EU, for example.) It never turns out great.
I'm not sure what this refers to. The two examples that come to mind, Sanna Marin and Kaja Kallas, were mostly elected for non-Russia-related reasons. Marin got his job due to internal Social Democratic party machinations, did this before the Russian invasion, and is not particularly militaristic for a Finnish politician. The biggest reason Kaja Kallas is in office is that her party, Reform, is Estonia's natural ruling party, and her father Siim Kallas was previously the PM (and Siim Kallas, in turn, got his job in the typical Eastern European way of having been a ranking CPSU member and making an advantageous switch to the capitalist side when the time was proper for that).
You're absolutely right in that they didn't particularly start out that way, instead they only took on that image afterwards.
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